Thursday, September 27, 2007

For once Nanny is right - in defence of the ban

Old news I grant you, but the smoking ban is a subject one or two members of our blog have strong opinions about.

'For once nanny is right
By Oliver Kamm
WHEN, ON the Radio 4 Today programme, David Hockney squared up to Julie Morgan, a Labour MP, he proved an invigorating denouncer of the nanny state. Against Ms Morgan’s arguments for a ban on smoking in public places, Hockney fulminated: “I think you are too bossy, chum. You are dreary.”

New Labour’s least appealing characteristic is its puritanism. Even where it expands private choice — lowering the age of consent for homosexuals — its arguments are exhortatory rather than libertarian. More usually, as on foxhunting, the Government’s instincts are to ban rather than regulate, and to regulate rather than allow people to arrive at private agreements.

Yet in this case the sanctimonious MP merits support. The bluff artist lambasting the Bossy Tendency is wrong. A smoking ban in public places is workable, as the Irish precedent shows, and principled.

Hockney speaks for the smokers’ rights group, Forest. For the group’s chairman, Lord Harris of High Cross, choice on tobacco is a lineal descendant of the “dogged persistence of economic liberals in a century-long struggle against often well-meaning collectivists in all parties”. Yet liberals recognise the problem of what economists call “externalities”: costs or benefits that accrue to someone other than the person responsible for creating them.

Pollution is an externality. Liberals often argue that property rights are a better way of coping with it than regulation. If a factory pollutes an adjoining river, then its owner will have a greater incentive to conserve resources if he has to compensate someone with a property claim to that stretch of river.

If Forest were arguing a consistent libertarian case, it would come up with a comparable scheme for compensating those who suffer from pollution caused by cigarette smoke. Forest has not done that, because it cannot. Private property rights are no solution, because it is impossibly complex to identify all who suffer the inconvenience and discomfort of a smoky atmosphere, and to draw up contracts with them to buy the right to pollute the air.

The right to pollute is not an axiom of a free society like the right to speak, worship or associate. It is the claim of a lobby group portentously appropriating high principle for self-interested ends. To adapt G. K. Chesterton’s advice to another public worthy: chuck it, Hockney.'

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - Dalrymple on 'Why Intellectuals Like Genocide'

'Twas Andy who drew my attention to this...

Why Intellectuals Like Genocide
by Theodore Dalrymple
July 2007

Seemingly arcane historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. It is for that reason that I like to read books on obscure subjects: they are often more illuminating than books that at first sight are more immediately relevant to our current situation. For, as Emily Dickinson put it, success in indirection lies.

In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island.

For about the previous quarter century, it was more or less an historical orthodoxy that there had been such a genocide. Robert Hughes accepted the idea in his best-selling history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore. I accepted it myself, because when I first visited Australia in 1982 I read several books on the subject by professors of history at reputable universities, and rather naively supposed that their work must have been founded on painstaking and honest research, and that they had not misrepresented their original sources.

Windschuttle argued in his book that they had fabricated much of their evidence, and that, contrary to what they claimed, there had been no deliberate policy on the part of the colonial authorities or the local population either to extirpate or kill very large numbers of aborigines. He showed that the historians’ reading of the obscure source materials was either misleading or mendacious.

He sifted the material very carefully and found that there was evidence for the killing of 120 Tasmanian aborigines, either by settlers or by the military and police. Although this does not sound many, in relation to the population of Tasmanian aborigines it was a lot. It is the equivalent in the United States of upwards of 7,000,000, for there were only about 4,000 aborigines (or so it is thought) at any one time in Tasmania.

However, a similar number of settlers were killed by aborigines, and perhaps it is not so very surprising that there was conflict between people of such widely different conceptions of life as the aborigines and the early British settlers. But conflict is not genocide, which entails a plan deliberately to rid the world of a certain population. There was no genocide in Tasmania. The Tasmanian aborigines did indeed die out in the nineteenth century, but largely of disease and as a result of the loss of fertility caused by the venereal disease introduced by the settlers.

After the book was published, there were furious challenges to Windschuttle. Slurs were cast upon him: he was, for example, the Australian equivalent of the holocaust deniers. A book of essays in refutation of his point of view was published; a refutation of the refutation was also published. He appeared all round the country in debates with some of his detractors. As far as I understand it, the massed ranks of the professional historians were unable seriously to dent his argument. A few small errors (which he acknowledged) were found in his book, but not such as to undermine his thesis; in any case, they were very minor by comparison with the wholesale errors of his opponents. He had been much more scrupulous than they.

What struck me at the time about the controversy was the evident fact that a large and influential part of the Australian academy and intelligentsia actually wanted there to have been a genocide. They reacted to Windschuttle’s book like a child who has had a toy snatched from its hand by its elder sibling. You would have thought that a man who discovered that his country had not been founded, as had previously been thought and taught, on genocide would be treated as a national hero. On the contrary, he was held up to execration.

Why should this be? Here I confess that I am entering the world of the ad hominem. I will not be able to prove my assertions beyond reasonable doubt, and other interpretations are possible. However, when it comes to questions of human motivation, it is difficult altogether to avoid the ad hominem.

It is, of course, possible, that the professors and the intelligentsia were so convinced that there had been a genocide, and believed that the evidence that it had taken place so overwhelming, that any person who denied it must have been an extremely bad man. On the other hand, if the evidence was so overwhelming, they should have been able easily to produce sufficient of it in public to convince someone like me (and many others). This they have not done, and so one must conclude that, at the very least, the historical question is an open one. And if the question is still an open one, the fury directed at Windschuttle was quite disproportionate.

I think the explanation lies elsewhere. Australia is known, not without reason, as the Lucky Country. It has virtually every resource known to man. It is a liberal democracy and has been for most of its existence. No one in Australia has ever feared the midnight knock on the door. To live well there requires a good deal less effort than in most places, perhaps anywhere else. The climate in much of the country (the current drought notwithstanding) is very pleasant. Overall, it is probably the best place, certainly among the best places, on earth to live. The fact that it is lucky is not, of course, a consequence of its natural endowments alone, but of what human beings have made of those endowments. Australia is a triumphant success.

This is not to say that everyone in Australia is deliciously happy, or that Australia is a prelapsarian Garden of Eden. People who live there, like people everywhere, have their problems. They go bankrupt, divorce, neglect their children, have accidents, die prematurely, kill themselves, overeat, drink too much, get bored, suffer illnesses, and so forth, just like people everywhere else.

The fact is, however, that political reforms in Australia, whatever they might be, are very unlikely to add much to the sum of human welfare there. Australia confronts human beings with their existential responsibility to make happiness for themselves, and this is sometimes a hard responsibility to face up to. For if you are unhappy in a country like Australia, you have to consider the possibility that the problem lies with you rather than with the conditions that surround you.

This is a disagreeable thing, particularly for an intelligentsia, which is deprived by it of a providential role for itself. What does an intelligentsia do when a country is already as satisfactory in its political arrangements and social institutions as any country has ever been? Intelligentsias do not like the kind of small problems that day to day existence inevitably throws up, such as termites in the woodwork or conflict at work over desk-space: they like to get their intellectual teeth into weightier, meatier problems.

What could be a weightier problem than a prosperous, fortunate country that was founded upon genocide? Clearly, if it was so founded, an intelligentsia is urgently needed to help it emerge from the dark moral labyrinth in which it exists, hitherto blindly. For only an intelligentsia is sufficiently used to thinking in abstractions to be qualified to act as guide to the nation.

Of course, an intelligentsia needs allies, for it is rarely strong enough by itself to dominate and control a society, and oddly enough the genocide school of Tasmanian history has created allies in people who now call themselves Tasmanian aborigines. But – I hear you object – I thought you said that Tasmanian aborigines died out in the nineteenth century (the last one being called Truganini)? Yes, I reply, but that is full-blooded aborigines. Because there were sexual relations between the first settlers and aborigine women, there exist people in Tasmania with aborigine blood running in the veins. Admittedly, that blood is almost as dilute as a homeopath’s medicine, but it is enough for some purposes.

Where there has been genocide, it is only right that there should be apology and, more importantly, reparation. In the case of the aborigines, this can only be restoration of the land to them as a collectivity. Indeed, it has been suggested that half the territory of the island of Tasmania be reserved to aborigines.

These aborigines live indistinguishably from their non-aboriginal neighbours. They speak no language other than English; they do not forage in the bush for food; they have the same jobs and are under no social disability, perhaps because they are also physically indistinguishable from non-aborigines. In fact they are descended to a much greater extent from the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the alleged genocide than from the victims of it. It would therefore be difficult to think of a more obvious attempted fraud perpetrated on a political entity than the claim by Tasmanian ‘aborigines’ to ancestral lands.

Actually, Tasmanian historiography of the genocide school has parallels elsewhere. I remember when I lived for a time in Guatemala reading the most currently-celebrated account of colonial Guatemala, called La patria del criollo. In all of its eight hundred pages the role of epidemic disease in reducing the number of Indians after the arrival of the Spanish was not mentioned even once, not even in passing, though it is almost certain (that is to say as certain as it can be) that the overwhelming cause of the decrease was epidemic disease.

Why was it not mentioned? Because the author wanted to present the current, supposedly lamentable state of Guatemala to be a direct consequence of the colonial era, which was itself a time of genocide. This being the case, there was only one thing to be done: to found the state anew, to start all over again, to build a new state from a better blueprint. It is not very difficult to see what role the intelligentsia would have in constructing the new society: a very powerful, indeed directing one.

The same is true in Australia, of course. If the current state was founded on genocide then, however superficially satisfactory it might appear at first sight, it is necessary to re-found it on a sounder, more ethical basis. And the architects and subsequent owner-managers will, of course, be the intelligentsia; for only they are qualified.

Now Australia is a country that in general, until recently at any rate, has not cherished its intellectuals. It has not accorded them the respect to which they think they are naturally entitled. Indeed, until a couple of decades ago it was common practice for Australian intellectuals to flee their country and live elsewhere, so strong was the anti-intellectual atmosphere of their county. Australia was not a lucky country as far as intellectuals were concerned.

That has changed quite a lot recently, but still intellectuals in Australia are not taken as seriously by the public as they take themselves. Besides, there are now more of them, and competition for attention is therefore greater. And there is nothing much more attention-grabbing than the claim that your current happiness and good fortune is founded on a pile of bones. With a bit of luck, this claim will even turn people neurotic and increase the need for therapists.

It is hardly surprising, then, that when someone came along and challenged the version of history on which their new-found importance in society was to be based, they threw their dolly out of the pram, as the prison wardens in the prison in which I worked used to put it to describe the actions of a prisoner who had lost his temper. The dispute was not just a matter of the interpretation of the contents of old newspapers in Hobart libraries: it went to the very heart of the intelligentsia’s self-conception as society’s conscience and natural leaders.

A conflict over the veracity of footnotes was thus also a conflict also over the proper place of intellectuals in modern society. And Windschuttle was vastly more often right about the footnotes than he was wrong. This was quite unforgivable of him.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

John Gray on Thatcher and Brown

Now that JP has taken against John Gray, the contrarian in me feels compelled to post an article by him. This is an interesting piece on Thatcher and Brown. Don't agree with it all but there's some interesting observations there. Bad news for Cameron too if he's right.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Israeli neo-Nazi gang filmed attacking Jews

Israeli neo-Nazi gang filmed attacking Jews
Telegraph
09/09/07
Israel was in shock this weekend after police revealed they had broken up a gang of homegrown neo-Nazis who praised Adolf Hitler, attacked orthodox Jews and surrounded themselves with the paraphernalia of white supremacists.

Israel's neo-Nazis stoke debate on Jewishness
Sydney Morning Herald
11/09/07

Deport Nazis, keep the law
JPost.com
Sep 9, 2007

Eilat shocked as neo-Nazi graffiti, swastikas discovered on synagogue
Ha'aretz
10/09/07

Tip of the iceberg
Neo-Nazi gang small part of much wider problem of violence
Ynet News
11/09/07

Thursday, September 06, 2007

A conservative manifesto...

Peter Hitchens has set out the principles by which he believes a true conservative manifesto ought to be written. Lots to argue with, I'm sure.

Here it is:

"Britain, though one of the freest countries in the world, and one of the most stable societies, with a long history of limited government and the rule of law, is not a happy, contented or particularly peaceful home for many of its inhabitants. Yet it is also uniquely prosperous, with material wealth unmatched in its history combined with enormous, generously funded public services and welfare systems for the less well-off.

Low-level disorder and misbehaviour are a grave and dispiriting feature of the lives of many. Authority seems unable or reluctant to act against either. Yet this weakness is coupled with an increasing amount of official, bureaucratic interference with the private and even personal lives of law-observing, productive, peaceful people.

A large part of the population is concentrated into the big cities and heavily-urbanised landscape of the South East. Many find the resulting congestion uncomfortable and are made anxious and bad-tempered by permanently thronged streets and almost unrelieved heavy road traffic. The high cost of housing means that many people are living in confined spaces, closer to their neighbours and more dependent on their goodwill than before.

Into this stressful and cramped society arrive increasing numbers of young people, who have been educated and raised in ways quite different from those common in the recent past. I am not talking about new migrants, but about the rising generation, especially among the poor. Households lack fathers, and in many cases any figure of authority at all. Old family and kinship networks, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friendly neighbours who keep an eye out for you, have virtually ceased to exist. Any adult who tries to discipline or even help a child to whom he is not related can be accused of 'paedophilia' or of assault. The police, who have some powers to intervene, rarely do so and are in any case largely absent. Home life, in homes without real families, is influenced by powerful outside forces - TV, advertising, computer games, rock music, even gangs - that challenge and deny the authority of parents when they try to exert it. Inevitably, these problems are worse in the areas where the poor live.

Schools, struggling to maintain discipline without the power to enforce it, and handicapped by some of the worst teaching methods and structures imaginable, can do little to overcome this. They are under competing pressures to expel pupils who will not behave (as the teachers and the pupils want) and to keep them in school (as the state wants). What were previously national habits of mind, based on a common understanding of the lore of the tribe gained through shared history, customs and traditions have lost their power because these things have simply ceased to be taught. People under 35 now often don't know them at all. The failure to teach good reading skills is also important, since these older forms of culture were often passed on through the written word and absorbed in the imagination - where moral questions are resolved. The more immediate influences of the rock, rap, drug, video-game culture enter the mind much more immediately, and bypass (and atrophy) the imagination.

In some of these areas, these problems are in fact sharpened by the presence of large numbers of recent immigrants, many of them not English speakers. In some cases, migrant groups bring with them nothing but good education and habits of hard work which put our own young people to shame. Many employers sadly complain that our own young, festooned with 'qualifications' lack basic knowledge, common sense or the ability to concentrate - whereas migrant workers make up for their poor English by having all these good qualities.

In some migrant groups, it is not always so. But in many cases, problems with such groups arise not when they first arrive, but when the second generation, born and raised here, confront the problems which arise from our society's failure to integrate their parents properly, sometimes worse than failure, since multiculturalism seems determined to keep them separate for ever. It would be absurd to deny that much of the social decay and chaos, in fact most of it, comes from indigenous British people who have been brought up without respect for law or authority. It would be equally absurd to deny that part of that problem also comes from migrants, or the British-born children of migrants, and the ridiculous policies which have been followed in settling them here.

There are many other social problems (we could go into these), many of them arising out of the ones I’ve named specifically. Many of them seem to stem from a dependency on various forms of welfare, and a belief that government action is the main solution for the problems of society. This is coupled with a change in the nature of virtue, with a strong, well-publicised social conscience being more highly regarded than a well-developed individual conscience. The result of this is a very high level of taxation, which is generally accepted as being necessary and right by those who pay for it - despite the inefficient and unfair delivery of the services paid for by this tax.

There is also a general acceptance of powerlessness, that nothing can be changed. No alternative is offered to this form of society except some version or other of Thatcherism, which in office failed to deal with many of these problems and made several of them worse.. Political, social and moral conservatism, a spurned alternative, has been excised from the programmes of all major parties. A dominant and intolerant ideology smears anyone who approaches this position as a hopeless nostalgist, obsessed with recovering a non-existent 'golden age' or as a racial bigot, unhinged fruitcake, extreme nationalist or closet Nazi. Worse, the transfer of power to the European Union means that a large amount of supposedly British regulation and legislation, from rubbish collection and Home Information Packs to data protection and safety legislation, is in fact not British at all, but originates from the European Commission, and is beyond the power of the electorate, or of the House of Commons.

This arrangement has certainly not led to widespread contentment. People are simultaneously materially well-off and yet full of dissatisfaction and concern for the future. But nor, at present, has it led to organised or focused discontent. That is partly because of low interest rates and generous welfare provisions, plus the huge number of jobs now provided by the state. But it is also partly because the only major vehicle for discontent accepts the status quo.

The Conservative Party is not opposed to the moral revolution, is not opposed to multiculturalism or the rewriting of the rules of family life, is not opposed to the level of welfarism or public employment, largely accepts the left-liberal view of national history and penology and - perhaps above all - is wedded to this country's continuing membership of the European Union.



****************

How to address this? The proper conservative has to be modest about what can be done, how fast it can be done, and remember that there are strong limits on a lawful government. Many of these problems are so deep, and excite such strong feelings, that he must also be careful not to create passions which get out of control and which he cannot satisfy. Much of the problem lies in the consciences of individuals and will not be fixed until and unless a new John Wesley appears, who can find some way of remoralising a population that is at least as demoralised as it was in the 18th century. (One rather alarming possibility is that such a figure will appear, and he will be a Muslim, which should concentrate our minds).

But a lot of what is necessary is the removal of obstacles which prevent people from living as they would like to, and as they ought. This must, in my view, begin with the reassertion of national legal independence, the right to make and enforce our own laws for ourselves. That means an unequivocal commitment to negotiate, as swiftly as possible, an amicable departure from the European Union. In my view, the majority of the population oppose EU rule over this country in practice - that is, they are angered and frustrated by their individual encounters with it. But they often do not realise that it is the EU that is responsible. The existence of a large and obviously responsible and coherent political party which advocates EU withdrawal would make that connection. One of the main reasons for a reluctance to favour departure is that voters see the leaders of the major parties united in favour of EU membership, and assume that they know something we don't. Not since Hugh Gaitskell has any significant or credible party leader taken a position in favour of national independence. Had any done so, support for departure would be much higher than it is. Level headed, unhysterical leadership, untainted by fake Churchillian rhetoric and linked to a serious programme on other issues, could quite easily climb over this barrier. It must, in any case, if it is to achieve anything.

One possible method would be to set out a programme, on issues across the whole area where the EU decides our laws, and to pursue each issue to the European Court of Justice to demonstrate the powerlessness of a British parliament inside the EU. And to behave at all times as if we were independent, and to draw noisy attention to the barriers which prevent us from being so. This would certainly educate the public, but it might also frustrate them and use valuable time. I think it should be the keystone of the manifesto, and that it should be explained why it had to be.

The issue on which this is clearest is that of control of our own borders, our own right to decide who lives here. Nobody who claims to be serious can really argue that we should not have this right - though there can be much disagreement over how we should exercise it. There is no more fundamental or decisive security barrier against the threats we currently fear. There is no basis for a reconsideration of our immigration policy without an absolute control of our frontiers. The restoration of a British passport, and of a British citizenship giving an absolute right of entry and residence, seems to me to be a simple and clear illustration of what independence means, what you cannot have without it, and what you can have if you regain it.

That is why both these issues should be prominent. Labour has long dreaded the existence of a party that could convincingly and respectably make this case, since large numbers of its current (and former) voters feel very strongly about this matter.

For that reason, the rest of the initial manifesto should bear in mind that it is the less well-off, the people living in the abandoned cities of the industrial areas or in the marginal suburbs, who may well be the main supporters of social conservatism. The old Tory upper middle class of independent professionals, educated at traditional schools and universities, has largely ceased to exist. There are middle class conservatives, but my guess is that they are these days at least equalled in numbers by middle class liberals and left-wingers - protected by affluence from many of the social consequences of left-wing policies.

So the rest of the first programme should be aimed very clearly at helping the strivers, the responsible, the thrifty, the ones on the frontier.

That means a series of simple measures on crime. They include the immediate repeal of the laws which prevent the police from patrolling effectively on foot, especially PACE 1984, and measures -probably based on budget allocations - putting severe pressure on chief constables to put their officers on such patrols by day and night. Longer term measures, like the breaking up of unwieldy large forces into smaller, truly local ones, would have to wait until a reform of local government in general, central to a revival of proper civic life, but necessarily a second-rank issue.

The prison regime should also be reformed, and once again based on the old principle of 'due punishment of responsible persons', so that punishment, in the form of arduous labour, deprivation of luxuries and comforts etc, could once again take place in prison, with facilities such as TV sets and pool tables available only as a reward for long-term good behaviour. The legal position of prison officers would have to be altered, so that their authority, and ability to exercise it, is restored. Remission and early release should once again be dependent entirely on good behaviour, and never automatic.

Penal policy on drugs should concentrate on possession, not on supply. Possession should be dealt with by a caution for a first offence, and three months imprisonment for a second. Effectively enforced, such a law should sharply reduce drug use and the criminal activities linked with it.

Schools should all have their ability to discipline pupils restored. How far could we go in this? Personally I think corporal punishment would be hard to restore in the existing climate, but an absolute power of expulsion, probably to special schools with the power to detain unruly pupils at evenings and weekends, might be an effective alternative. In all such measures, we should seek for ingenuity and subtlety rather than crudity. A good example of this is Norman Tebbit's measures to control the trades unions. Rather than threats of prison, or stripping away privileges, the laws used a sort of judo. The unions' legal immunities were guaranteed - provided they introduced strike ballots and fair elections for their leaders, controlled unofficial strikes and ceased secondary pickets.

As for the schools themselves, education reform should concentrate on ensuring a good basic education for the children of those who cannot afford private fees or postcode selection - and should be presented as such. This means the return of selection by merit on the German model, and the establishment, for the moment only in areas now blighted by bad comprehensives, of a first generation of new grammar schools whose aim is unequivocally to benefit the poor. This would obviously require serious reforms of the feeder primary schools, and would necessarily the construction of new technical and vocational schools of high standard, for those who did not qualify for an academic secondary education.

No pledges, in my view, should be made for tax cuts at this stage. A society so heavily dependent on welfare needs to be weaned off it, and reformed so that it actually desires to come off it.

And gosh, is that the time? I have got almost nowhere and spent much of the day doing it. Imagine what it would be like getting even this modest programme through a sharply-divided Parliament in, say, four years. I hope for your interested criticisms and contributions."